The last laugh

Neither the two India Against Corruption activists, Arvind Kejriwal and Prashant Bhushan, who have levelled serious charges of financial misdemeanours against Robert Vadra, nor the spokespersons of the Congress, who have rushed to defend him with counter-allegations against the duo, will emerge unscathed from the spat between them. Both are blunderers in that they have chosen to trade invectives through the media rather than to argue their case where it ought to be argued: in a court of law.

The response of the Congress is, to put it bluntly, pitiable. Vadra’s only claim to fame, if that is the word, is the fact that he belongs, thanks to a matrimonial alliance, to the Nehru-Gandhi family. He holds no post in the party. He is, in other words, like any other citizen. And in that capacity, it is for him, not for the party, to defend himself. So, instead of saying that the charges against Vadra are a matter between him and his detractors, the Congress spokespersons have turned the entire episode as one that pits the Congress, and especially its president, Sonia Gandhi, his mother-in-law, against its opponents, notably the BJP.Let us assume for a moment, as the Congress does, that Kejriwal and Bhushan indeed function as the B-team of the BJP. How can this detract from the substance of their charge that Vadra and his mother have amassed huge wealth within a short span of three years? The documents that Kejriwal and Bhushan cited are in the public domain. So it stands to reason that Vadra must explain the sudden surge in his assets.

At this time of writing, Vadra hasn’t spoken a word in his defence. Perhaps he believes in the adage that the answer to calumny is silence. But this will simply not wash in the eyes of public opinion. It expects Vadra to come clean either by taking questions from the media or by filing a defamation suit against his detractors. The latter is a preferable course for the obvious reason that the courts alone can settle the issue.

The intriguing question here is why Sonia Gandhi fielded the party’s spokespersons to rubbish the allegations of Kejriwal and Bhushan with such vehemence. The only plausible answer is that, aware of the intent of the duo to really target her and not her son-in-law, she, as the head of the Nehru-Gandhi family, wanted to demonstrate to the world that it is her responsibility to defend its honour. When all else has failed, she doubtless reckoned, the opposition has always chosen calumny to tarnish the family’s image. Indira Gandhi, her mother-in-law, had braved such an assault. So had Rajiv Gandhi, her husband, notably in the Bofors case. So she may have decided that the best defence in the latest instance is a no-holds-barred offensive.

The problem, however, is that, unlike the tribulations of the past, this time Sonia Gandhi has to contend with RTI, an assertive judiciary and, not least, the pervasive presence of 24X7 TV channels and the Internet that has a voracious appetite for instant drama, the more polarised the better. Media persons would seek answers to the specific charges aired by Kejriwal and Bhushan regardless of the Congress rebuttals that question their credentials and purpose. This, in turn, can only divert attention from the Congress president’s spirited election campaign and from the government’s vigorous pursuit of measures needed to rejuvenate the economy.

None of this should detract from the methods that Kejriwal and Bhushan have deployed to run down the Nehru-Gandhi family. In their new avatar as freshly-minted politicians, they are expected to attain their goals through legal, constitutional and electoral means available to them. If, as they allege, they have enough evidence to nail down Robert Vadra, they too can file a case in a court of law, and not use the media, to bring him to book. In the absence of a proper trial, their fulminations will be seen to be no more than sinister tactics designed to acquire visibility for their yet-to-be-named political outfit.

However, what this unseemly war of words has done is to overlook a deep structural malaise in our polity: the growing nexus between politicians, bureaucrats and corporate entities to corner the nation’s resources whether it is land, the spectrum, coal, minerals or the allocation of contracts for government- financed projects. And this nexus cuts across party lines and ideological divides.

Perched on their high moral ground, Kejriwal and Bhushan have no time or interest to address the malaise. Two days ago, they trained their guns on Robert Vadra. Two days from now, they could, just to demonstrate their independent profile, train them at a big-wig from a major opposition party. Such eager- beavers provide no more than an irritating side-show in the rough-and-tumble of democracy. Let’s see who gets the last laugh.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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The last laugh

Notwithstanding a nasty shock — albeit a brief one – received at Anna’s hands, just a summer ago, the politicians seem to be having the last laugh after all. Yesterday’s newspapers carried a tiny little news item that flies in the face of all the common man’s sentiments against corruption that have been on the forefront of the nation in recent times. According to the new item, A. Raja, Kanimozhi and Kalmadi have been nominated to various Parliament Committees. Yes, that’s right. A. Raja and Kanimozhi, the severely tainted duo in the infamous 2G scam, have been nominated as members of Standing Committee on Energy and Home Affairs respectively. And Suresh Kalmadi of CWG infamy has been made member of the Standing Committee on External affairs. So are their respective parties gradually working on rehabilitating their careers interrupted by their sojourns in Tihar jail?

Now it is true that Supreme Court has ruled that non-auctioning of the 2G licenses by itself was not wrong and that maximizing public good rather than maximizing revenue should govern how natural resources are sold, as long as the method followed is transparent and fair. Now that is hardly a vindication of the likes of Raja or Kanimozhi. The manner in which Raja violated the elementary norms of first-come-first served principle, favouring himself, his kin, kith, and others involving generous kickbacks all around, hardly absolves him or Kanimozhi, who also faces various charges of corruption and bribery. It is a different matter that the Government has clutched at the fig leaf of the SC judgment to cover the 2G scandal, as if the scandal was only about auctioning or not auctioning the spectrum. Kalmadi too has been seriously accused of being a party to many a deal involving kickbacks. So what is going on? Is this a classic case of how the high and mighty are rehabilitated smoothly into the system?

We may be told that these worthies have every right to be nominated to such committees, since as of now they have not been indicted. As a matter of fact, they may never be indicted and may all live up to a ripe old age, without ever paying for their gross abuse of public office for personal gains. And since one is presumed innocent until proven guilty, we must forever live with the presumption that Raja, Kanimozhi and Kalmadi and others of their ilk are pure innocent souls.

In short, it is business as usual with our political class. The light at the end of the tunnel we were beginning to see has turned out to be a mere passing fire-fly.

Now, Anna Hazare brought corruption to the centre stage of the nation like no one ever had before. So after all the brouhaha, if the political class is back to its good old ways, who is responsible? Anna himself? Members of Team Anna? All of us collectively as a nation?

As far as Anna is concerned, to be fair, he is neither a serious leader nor an intellectual, and I do not mean this in an unkindly way. He is what he is – a good man, a good ex-havaldar from the Indian Army, who found his calling after an unremarkable first career, as a social worker, reforming drunkards in his village – using what he had learnt in the Army best, namely kicking ass – and putting that little ‘unit’ of a village ship-shape. This is not to belittle his achievement in anyway, but to put it in perspective, so that we realize that any expectation we might have had from him of intellectual leadership of the nation-wide movement he had started, over the likes of qualified civil servants, jurists and lawyers like Kejriwal, Kiran Bedi, Santosh Hedge, Shanti Bhushan or Prashant Bhushan et al, would have been misplaced to start with.

Willy nilly, providence made Anna – a Gandhian in his simplicity, but hardly with the education, formidable savvy and intellect of a Gandhi – the man instrumental in setting up the stage, with the main prop, namely corruption, thus preparing it for the rest of the drama to play out. But we the audience mistook him to be the main and sole protagonist in an act, which ideally had to be a blockbuster multi-starrer, with the chief villain played by the archetypical political class. Clearly, Anna was no bulging-bicep superman capable of taking on the vile villain head-on. Ideally, the rest of society should have used the stage he had prepared to take the play to its logical conclusion. He probably himself did not realize exactly what his role was, and when the larger society did not take the cue, and play their respective roles, he tried to interpret the play as best as he could and tried playing a mono-act, supported by half a dozen side-kicks who had ambitions of their own, falling flat in the process. He also probably expected – wrongly it would seem in retrospect – the political class to have a conscience.

Can we blame Team Anna, most of whom at best are individuals who had willy-nilly found a national platform to voice their ire against rampant corruption, and at worst opportunists with their own little agendas, each different from the other, with no larger and cohesive game plan? Hardly. They simply did not have the stature, jointly or severally, to carry the movement on their shoulders, even if they were mostly well-meaning.

The problem rests with us, collectively as a people. Why should we get disillusioned with Anna Hazare’s or his team’s lack of plot? Why is it his or their responsibility to have a plot any more than the rest of us? One would think, with his simple life-style, Anna’s direct brush with corruption would probably be far less than most of us, so that corruption should ideally impact us much more than it should probably impact him. So why could we not script the plot ourselves as a spontaneous mass movement, if as a people we are truly fed up of corruption? Did we seriously think decades of deep-rooted corruption to be eliminated by one Anna or his small cohort in three months? Why did we not give enough support to Anna in his second round? Why were the grounds virtually empty in Mumbai, when Anna shifted his venue from Delhi to Mumbai? Why haven’t any institutions come forward promising to eschew corruption from their institutions? Why haven’t the many employees’ unions shown a similar stand? The reason is, with our usual fatalism, we have learnt to live with corruption, expecting someone else to come and save us, even if it has to be a fragile Anna. We will not want to rise ourselves out of our morass of corruption.

So no wonder the politicians are having the last laugh.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Author

V Raghunathan is a former professor of finance, IIM, Ahmedabad, and is an adjunct professor, SDA Bocconi, Milan. He is also a former banker (president, ING Vysya Bank) and currently a corporate CEO. He is also an author and a columnist, with over 10 books and 500 papers and articles to his credit. His latest book is Locks, Mahabharata and Mathematics (Harper Collins, 2013). His other books include Games Indians Play (Penguin), Ganesha on the Dashboard (Penguin), Don’t Sprint the Marathon (Harper Collins) and The Corruption Conundrum (Penguin). He figures in the definitive list of top 50 global Indian thinkers of Thinkers50. Collecting old and ancient padlocks is his hobby.

V Raghunathan is a former professor of finance, IIM, Ahmedabad, and is an adjunct professor, SDA Bocconi, Milan. He is also a former banker (president, ING . . .